The Story of a Three-Day Pass
Cinema that chronicles the Black liberation movement of the 1970s, in the wake of the civil rights movement, provides a fertile ground for expression. Wildly creative in form, the films in this program never lose sight of the social significance of their subject matter. A few titles from before and after that period complete the picture. Guest programmer: eunice bélidor.
Preceded by short film Blur
Presented by guest programmer eunice bélidor
Gloria sits quietly at a bus stop at night, waiting. Memories from her youth suddenly flood and take control of her thoughts. A dreamlike, nonlinear narrative unfolds and binds us to “Dre,” a young man experiencing an intense personal crisis. What follows is a brief record of caregiving in the world. Blur presents an impressionistic evocation of loss and the lives that emerge in its aftermath, inviting viewers to meditate on the complexities of time and the haptic quality of memory.
Turner, an African American soldier stationed in France, is granted a promotion and a three-day leave from base by his casually racist commanding officer and heads to Paris, where he finds whirlwind romance with a white woman — but what happens to their love when his furlough is over? Channeling the brash exuberance of the French New Wave, Van Peebles creates an exploration of the psychology of an interracial relationship as well as a commentary on France's contradictory attitudes about race that is playful, sarcastic, and stingingly subversive by turns, and that laid the foundation for the scorched-earth cinematic revolution he would unleash just a few years later with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. (Janus Films)
Melvin Van Peebles
Melvin Van Peebles was an American actor, filmmaker, writer, and composer. His feature film debut, The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967), was based on his own French-language novel La permission and was shot in France, as it was difficult for a black American director to get work at the time. The film won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival which gained him the interest of Hollywood studios, leading to his American feature debut Watermelon Man in 1970. Eschewing further overtures from Hollywood, he used the successes he had so far to bankroll his work as an independent filmmaker. In 1971, he released his best-known work, creating and starring in the film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which led to the creation of the blaxploitation genre, although critic Roger Ebert did not consider this example of Van Peebles' work to be an exploitation film. He followed this up with the musical, Don't Play Us Cheap, based on his own stage play, and continued to make films, write novels and stage plays in English and in French through the next several decades; his final films include the French-language film Le conte du ventre plein (2000) and the absurdist film Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (2008). His son, filmmaker and actor Mario Van Peebles, appeared in several of his works and portrayed him in the 2003 biographical film Baadasssss!.
Explore
On our blog
Black Power : la poésie d’une lutte
La programmatrice invitée eunice bélidor nous présente le cycle Black Power : la poésie d'une lutte, présenté jusqu'au 31 mars.
« Je souhaitais utiliser le cinéma comme moyen de montrer la beauté et la poésie qui émergent des situations les plus difficiles. »
